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by inkasrain



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, dark!fic, issues of sanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 06:36:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4950364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkasrain/pseuds/inkasrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simmons is back from a lonely hell. The hard part is just beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> I just couldn't help but wonder how Simmons will find her sudden return to reality... and what might happen if it doesn't go well.

There are times when she knows it isn’t real.

The cup of tea in her hand. Clean sheets on her soft bed. Fitz by her side. _Are you all right, Jemma? Let me help you with that--_

She smiles a little and lets him take care of whatever it is; a bunsen smoking as she stares into space, a dinner knife clenched in her fist. She is all right. This dream might be the one that kills her, but it seems so real that it almost doesn’t matter.

Then there are times she knows it _is_ real - the tea, the bed, and Fitz - it’s all quite real, but it feels foreign, false. Real should be better, she knows; she had always been obsessed with reality, finding the truest truth in life’s infinite layers.

But it’s worse.

Coulson talks to her, gives her an assignment and she listens through the scouring howl of wind that blows a galaxy away. Bobbi pats her shoulder, and she jumps, the bite of phantom rock against her back. Skye - _Daisy_ \- smiles at her in the lab, and Simmons sees her as though from a great distance, her vision blurred by a valley where the air is dirty and blue and all she wants to do is sleep.

That is the first time she faints without warning. She cracks her head on the clean table, earns a neat gash near her ear. When she wakes, surrounded by faces, she panics. Her nails break as she scrapes the tiles for mud that might save her life.

Everyone is terribly upset by this. It’s only Fitz’s voice that brings her back, that reminds her that there is no beast behind her, no need to hide herself from its terrifying senses. As she sits shaking on a gurney, she realizes that the dark smell of her blood is reassuring. She watches it dry slowly brown on her fingertips, and Daisy is trying to get her attention, _is she crying, you really should say something_ but she can’t seem to look away from the dark proof of this reality.

After this, Daisy doesn’t come by very often.

 

* * *

 

She is ravenously hungry, but it’s hard to eat. She takes food from the kitchen and stores it in her room for later, when her teeth stop hurting and her stomach stops turning over. She puts a scalpel under her pillow, a cannister of neurotoxin on the desk. One morning the windows show her the screaming sun, so close and unhelpful. By that evening the windows are shuttered and bolted - though the lights in her room are never switched off.

Then she swallows water in the shower and faints again, swept down the drain by the memory of a tiny choked stream gurgling with water that tasted of metal. She wakes up calm when Fitz pounds on the door, but she is slightly concussed and has a sprained wrist.

Later, in the med bay, Fitz’s eyes watch her like clouds.

“You’ll be all right,” he says, very quietly.

There are words she’s supposed to say, to return to him. Like a gift, like Daisy, but the shelves of her mind are empty and she has nothing to say.

From the doorway, Simmons hears Fitz mention Dr. Garner and then senses a shadow around his name; it’s not brought into the light again.

 

* * *

 

Fitz becomes her shadow. He cuts her food at meals, encouraging bites past her aching teeth - they’re fine, she had x-rays, there’s nothing wrong, they hurt - and rarely goes to the lab anymore. She wanders, and he wanders with her, and sometimes holds the things she collects until she puts them in her room, tripping over unopened cans of fruit and forgotten loaves of bread.

Fitz helps her in the shower, too. He washes her down sometimes, almost too gently to clean, and she tries to decide that this is not real, but it has been so long since she’s seen her own body that she still can’t help but stare. It is too strange to be a lie, like her first days in the wilderness; angles and planes and valleys, ribs rearing up like mountains.

The tiles spin...

“Jemma?” Fitz’s voice is flat, like the moon looks before you learn anything about it. It pulls her back like the tide. “Jemma, what’s this?”

He points to the line of thin crusted slices on her upper arm. She looks back at him, confused. His face drips water; the clouds in his eyes have burst.

“Proof,” she explains.

 

* * *

 

That night, she has a premonition and a stroke of genius.

She pulls her mattress off the bed, planting it on the floor the by the shuttered windows. She flips the bedframe, straining and breathless, so it rests on its side and holds her in against the wall. She tries to pull the desk in front of the door, but she has no more strength and has to leave it halfway across the room.

She stumbles back over moldy bread and unopened jars of peanut butter to the fortress of her bed. Pulls out the scalpel, dips it a jug of alcohol. She likes the smell; it is cleaner than poison.

It is when she drawing another line of proof across her upper arm, delighting in the dark red evidence that seeps across her mattress, that Fitz enters. Coulson is with him.

But she is mesmerized, and relieved, and nodding off to a shivering sleep. The scalpel is clutched in her hand but her eyes are already closed and so she does not hear the knocking or the door open or the silence that followed. She does not see the Director’s face turn white, or Fitz’s eyes turn red. She does not know about the argument, the decision.

The change.

She wakes to Fitz’s hand on her shoulder and cries out, stabbing with the scalpel. Fitz leans back until she returns to the bright room filled with food, the sweet pain in her arm providing reassurance.

“Fitz,” she says. His face is…

“Jemma. I… I’m going away for a little while.”

In her mind the first “away” is that distant planet, and her terror must show in her eyes because he grips both her hands and peers deep inside her.

“I’m going to my mum, Jemma. To see my mum.”

There is something absurd about this, something backwards and wrong. She has been here before. She has spoken these words and answered these questions, but there is some crucial piece missing that leaves a blank page where her tongue should be.

“It will only be for a few weeks.”

His hands are cold and hot and once, and she shivers and opens her mouth. There’s a lie here, but she can’t find it. There is tea in her hands and the tea is real, a scratchy kiss on her temple that she isn’t sure of, and a closing door.

And the scalpel is gone.

 


End file.
